Monday, November 19, 2012

Do NOT miss this insane rant from Michael Hanlon: "Humans walking around outside will die. No one will live in Florida any more, or Louisiana. Much of the American sunbelt will be reduced to a depopulated desert or swamp"

If these are truly the thoughts of Britain's sharpest newspaper science journalist, I don't even want to think about what Britain's stupidest newspaper science journalist might write.

Up to now the disasters predicted by climatologists have mostly involved rising sea levels, flooded deltas, droughts and storms and changing atmospheric circulation (giving a future Britain, for example, colder, snowier winters and hotter drier summers)...according to Steven Sherwood, an Atmospheric Scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, rising overall temperatures will mean that this limit will soon regularly be breached and the 35C limit of human survivability will be surpassed on a regular basis....By the last 23rd Century, the cities of Houston, Shanghai, New Orleans, Tel Aviv and Lagos will be abandoned – not because of sea level rises but because in the summer months at least they will simply be uninhabitable. Humans walking around outside will die. No one will live in Florida any more, or Louisiana. Much of the American sunbelt will be reduced to a depopulated desert or swamp....The best models now predict a rise in temperatures by 2100 of between 3 and 7C (the former equates to a sometimes deadly but mostly survivable menace; if the latter, then it’s game over: fill the bath and buy a gun)....If parts of the currently inhabited world start to become unliveable in my lifetime, if they really do have to abandon Houston before I am dead (one of the most Heat stress-prone cities) we really are on the verge of witnessing something as remarkable as it will be ghastly....Michael is Britain’s sharpest and most well-read newspaper science journalist.